It was a joyous occasion in London’s Parliament Square on Tuesday when Gillian Wearing’s sculpture of Millicent Garrett Fawcett was unveiled, marking the latter’s contribution not just to the extension of the franchise, but to other causes for which she energetically worked: women’s education, rights for sex workers, and challenging the brutal conditions in Britain’s concentration camps in the Boer war, among others. The position of the new statue is important. Flanked by the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Whitehall, and with Buckingham Palace a stone’s throw away, Parliament Square represents the heart of British power and the establishment. (It has been, too, the site of some of Britain’s most remarkable acts of dissent, notably Brian Haw’s extraordinary decade-long peace camp erected in protest against the Iraq war.) The square is also the home of 11 – now 12 – sculptures of notable people. Until this week, they were all of men: Disraeli, Churchill, Palmerston, Gandhi, Canning, Derby, Smuts, Lincoln, Mandela, Peel and Lloyd George.

What tempered the optimism of the day was that it has taken so long for this domination of the male in Parliament Square to have been broken, as London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, noted in his speech at the unveiling. That it happened at all is down to the campaigner Caroline Criado Perez, who had already successfully made the case for a portrait of Jane Austen to appear on the Bank of England £10 note (Scotland, meanwhile, has two women on its new polymer banknotes, poet Nan Shepherd and scientist Mary Somerville). Fawcett would have recognised Ms Criado Perez’s techniques: she started with a petition, just as did Fawcett when she began working on women’s suffrage.

It is true that quite often public statues are not especially successful as sculpture, and British cities are littered with some wince-inducing specimens. It is true that there may be better ways of honouring memories than putting up a statue. (One thinks of Jeremy Deller’s moving centenary memorial to the soldiers of the Somme on 1 June 2016, in which young men, dressed in first world war uniforms, quietly gathered in public places up and down the UK.) It is true that sculptures of past worthies can fade into the background of an urban experience, rather than forming its focus – half-remembered military men, many of them the representing beliefs that would hardly be applauded today, abound in the UK’s municipal spaces.

But as Mr Khan argued, statues do provide a barometer of the values of a time and a place. Putting them up – and taking them down – can become acts freighted with significance, arousing fierce passions. In the American south, the erection of confederate statues during the era of the civil rights movement reflected a desire to uphold notions of white supremacy. Footage of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in April 2003 flashed around the world – at the time, it was invoked as symbol of the swift victory of the US and its allies, but later came to signify the bathetic overreach of their ambition. Recent arguments over the commemoration of Cecil Rhodes have been bitter. Whether to commemorate Sylvia Pankhurst – suffragette, anti-colonialist, radical – in a sculpture in London is the subject of a current debate.

The sculptures that adorn our public spaces matter. It is time for women – and not just the semi-naked women who are sculpted as allegories for Justice or Peace – to become part of the grammar of our streets. Ms Wearing’s accomplished bronze makes a good start.